balouthebear

The second most asked token I get is $LINK. And it’s a tricky one. As a product, Chainlink is indispensable. RWAs don’t scale without reliable data, proof of reserves, and secure offchain → onchain infrastructure. A lot of this market will depend on them. However… I’m still not fully convinced on the token. Yes there are fees. Yes there’s staking.bBut it’s still not clear how much value actually flows back into $LINK itself. From my standpoint: The product = essential The token = still proving itself Bull case for $LINK would be : > Becomes the standard for RWA data + verification > Trillions in assets rely on Chainlink feeds + infra > Staking scales → large % of supply locked > CCIP becomes the default cross-chain settlement layer > LINK becomes economic security for the entire system If all of that plays out… Then LINK isn’t just a token, it “would” become the backbone collateral of onchain finance. Right now, I see one of the best products in crypto attached to a token still trying to find its final form. I feel it’s pretty hard to argue with that.

My sources advise me that UAE has put an unofficial limit of $100K to avoid capital flight. Banks will not let you send more than that amount outbound. This shows how serious the situation Iran has created in GCC countries housing US bases. Iran is giving its neighbours a choice. Do not rebuild US bases and understand the new reality, which is that accommodation with Iran is necessary for your economies to function. This war even when it ends will have a long tail.

Armstrong is telling you AI agents need crypto because they can’t use banks, and nobody’s noticing that Visa, Mastercard, Google, Stripe, and PayPal already built the answer. Visa completed hundreds of agent-initiated transactions in live pilots last year. Mastercard launched Agent Pay with tokenized credentials across all U.S. issuers. Google shipped an entire Agent Payments Protocol. Santander and Mastercard ran Europe’s first regulated AI agent payment two weeks ago. The “agents can’t open bank accounts” framing sounds clean, but it skips what’s actually happening. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol uses cryptographic signatures to authenticate AI agents the same way it authenticates human cardholders. The agent gets a token linked to your account. No bank account needed for the agent. No KYC for the bot. The human already passed that gate. This tells you everything about how the payments industry views this race. Coinbase’s x402 protocol has processed 50 million transactions since February, which sounds like scale until you realize Visa processes that volume roughly every 90 minutes. Visa is working with 100+ partners across six continents. Mastercard launched an entire Agent Suite in January with 4,000 advisors. These companies process 3.4 trillion transactions annually and they’re retooling all of it for agents. The real constraint for AI agent payments is liability. When an agent books the wrong flight or buys the wrong size, who eats the cost? Visa’s Ramachandran said it directly: agents are now a fifth party in the dispute chain. Crypto has no dispute chain. No chargebacks. No consumer protection. For a billion agents making mistakes at machine speed, that’s a feature for Coinbase and a problem for the person whose agent just bought 400 economy seats to Mumbai. Coinbase wins the long tail. Agent-to-agent micropayments, DeFi, on-chain operations where no merchant exists. That’s a real market. But “agents can’t use banks” is a 2024 take running on a 2026 timeline where Visa is telling merchants to prepare for AI agent checkout by holiday season. The incumbents aren’t sleeping through this one. They’re spending more, moving faster, and they already have the merchants. Crypto becomes a rail for agents. Visa and Mastercard are betting their entire product roadmap it won’t be the primary one.

AI agents will make 1 million times more payments than humans, and they will use crypto.

Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions. They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet. Think about it.